Very informative polling site ....Mystery Pollster...The Incumbent Rule

[RedEarth]

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/

here is his explanation of The Incumbent Rule

October 03, 2004
The Incumbent Rule
In discussing recent poll results, I said last week that I tend to focus most on President Bush's job rating and percentage of the vote (which tend to track closely with each other), adding, "that both are hovering just at or above 50 suggest an ultimately close contest, with Bush receiving just about the support he needs to win." Many of you asked me to elaborate, and I had been meaning to write up an explanation of what pollsters often refer to as the "Incumbent Rule," that explains why the undecided vote often breaks toward challengers in races featuring an incumbent.

Then, just as I started writing this up in earnest, another Democratic pollster named Guy Molyneux, a partner at Peter D. Hart Research Associates, beat me to the punch. His excellent article in the American Prospect, "The Big Five-Oh," which appeared online on Friday, makes more or less the same argument I had been promising. It is worth reading in full, but let me first give you the gist and offer some additional supporting evidence.

The basic idea is that voters make their decisions differently in races involving an incumbent. When newcomers vie to fill an open office, voters tend to compare and contrast the candidates' qualifications, issues positions and personal characteristics in a relatively straightforward way. Elections featuring an incumbent, on the other hand, are as Molyneux puts it, "fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent." Voters will first grapple with the record of the incumbent. Only if they decide to "fire" the incumbent do they begin to evaluate whether the challenger is an acceptable alternative.

Voters typically know incumbents well and have strong opinions about their performance. Challengers are less familiar and invariably fall short on straightforward comparisons of experience and (in the presidential arena) command of foreign policy. Some voters find themselves conflicted -- dissatisfied with the incumbent yet also wary of the challenger -- and may carry that uncertainty through the final days of the campaign and sometimes right into the voting booth. Among the perpetually conflicted, the attitudes about the incumbent are usually more predictive of these conflicted voters' final decision than their lingering doubts about the challenger. Thus, in the campaign's last hours, we tend to see "undecided" voters "break" for the challenger.